by Barbara Arrowsmith-Young ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2012
An inspiring, instructive life story.
A pioneer in the treatment of learning disabilities describes how she diagnosed her own mental disability and created unique exercises to retrain her brain.
Arrowsmith-Young’s goal is to train educators—her method is now taught at more than 30 schools in the United States and Canada—and create tailor-made cognitive exercises for students at her Toronto school. The author chronicles how she overcame her inability to conceptualize causality despite having excellent audio and visual memory. She could “make no sense of the relationship between the big and little hands of an analogue clock.” Even simple arithmetic was beyond her capability, and her reading comprehension was poor. She had difficulty following conversations, catching only fragments at a time and then replaying them in her head later. By dint of her “singular work ethic and gritty determination to succeed,” she stumbled through school by relying on her phenomenal memory to compensate for her disabilities. While studying child behavior in graduate school in the late 1970s, Arrowsmith-Young discovered a book by Soviet neuropsychologist Aleksandr Luria, in which the author described his work with brain-injured World War II veterans. She was amazed to find that many of their symptoms paralleled her own, and she also learned about rats whose brains showed physical change as a result of being placed in stimulating environments. Consequently, the author devised a series of increasingly complex exercises, drilling herself with flash cards showing the hands of a clock in different positions. Her success in increasing her mental function laid the basis for her teaching method, which challenges students to directly address their handicaps. Arrowsmith-Young provides helpful anecdotes that indicate impressive improvements achieved by her students by following the mental exercises that she has developed.
An inspiring, instructive life story.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-0793-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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